


After the War

by ambyr



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, F/M, Past Brainwashing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 08:32:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10158848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/pseuds/ambyr
Summary: The first thing Joo Dee does after the war is change her hair.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShadowEtienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowEtienne/gifts).



The first thing Joo Dee does after the war is change her hair. She wakes up one morning and, instead of pulling it back and knotting it with the broad wooden hair piece she has worn for the past eight years of her life, she spends hours methodically applying a hot iron. The end result is more unkempt lion turtle's mane than carefully arranged ringlets, but, savagely, she tells herself she does not care. The important thing is that the Dai Li would have hated it, and she strides out into the afternoon with that thought to give her confidence.

She still reaches, reflexively, for the hair piece most mornings. The Dai Li's training is hard to overcome. But she counts it as a victory every time she picks it up, runs her hands along its familiar lines and curves, and sets it aside.

* * *

The second thing Joo Dee does after the war is learn to frown. She practices every chance she gets--in her washroom mirror, in shop windows, in the still pools of water that fill the streets after a rain. She forces herself to press her lips together, to draw the inner corners of her eyes down. She frowns at pygmy pumas who cross her path in the street, at clouds that temporarily block the sun, at the young man who brings her tea at the tea shop. 

The latter flinches, sloshing tea out of the cup, and without thinking she replaces the frown with a brilliant smile. When he gamely smiles back, she realizes what she's done and frowns again. His look of confusion at her rapidly flickering expressions is so comical that she loses the frown again, this time to burst out laughing. Her laughter is contagious, and soon they are both laughing, chortling, grabbing their sides. The tea, forgotten, spills entirely onto the floor. It takes the shopkeeper's intervention to bring them to order.

Joo Dees may giggle and twitter, but it has been a very, very long time since Joo Dee has laughed.

* * *

The third thing Joo Dee does after the war is leave the city. Her hair is still in tangles, but there are no clouds to frown at. It is just past dawn on a fine, spring day, and she joins a long line of other Earth Kingdom citizens on the road through the outer ring to the final city wall. They all have places to go and things to carry. She has nothing, save for the clothes on her back and a bundle of food prepared by the laughing boy at the tea shop. She gave him the hairpiece to remember her by.

"But I've never seen you wear this," he said, puzzled.

"Even so," she agreed.

(She gave him a kiss, too, and laughed gently when it left him looking as confused as the first day they met. Joo Dees do not kiss. Perhaps she did it wrong. Like frowning, she thinks, it is a thing she will need to practice.)

She could stay in Ba Sing Se with the laughing boy in the tea shop, practicing frowning, practicing kissing, practicing being something other than a Joo Dee. But in Ba Sing Se, where the memory of the Dai Li is etched (often literally) into every stone, she will always be defining herself by what she is _not_. Outside the city, she thinks, she might find out who she is.

With each step she takes, she tries a new name. She does not know how far she'll need to travel before she finds one that fits--but she finds herself smiling anyway, smiling at the road and the sun and the birdmouse singing in the bushes. Not a Joo Dee smile, she thinks, but her smile, small and slightly twisted and reflected in a crinkle at the corner of her eyes. She doesn't know whose smile it is, but she looks forward to learning.


End file.
